Computers have become a ubiquitous tool in a modern office environment. As such, equipping each office employee in a large office environment with a personal desktop computer (also known as a workstation in an office environment) can require a large capital investment. In addition to the initial capital investment, maintaining and servicing each workstation requires additional and continual capital expenditures.
An expensive component of a workstation is a hard disk, both in terms of initial purchase cost and repair/replacement costs. A hard disk is an electromechanical device having components continually in motion. Because moving mechanical parts are inherently more prone to failure than electronic components, hard disks are a regular source of workstation failure. Accordingly, diskless workstations have been developed to overcome the above drawbacks associated with hard disks. Diskless workstations eliminate drive read errors and tend to be less expensive with enhanced reliability.
To be useful, a workstation must be able to send, receive and store information. Thus, diskless workstations may optionally include an inexpensive floppy disk drive to allow a user of the diskless workstation to save data to and/or load data from. However, floppy disk drives generally do not provide sufficient storage capacity to hold an operating system (“OS”) for the diskless workstation to boot from and even to store ordinary files, such as image files. Accordingly, diskless workstations are generally coupled to a network, such as a local area network (“LAN”).
Preboot execution environment (“PXE”) refers to an Intel™ Wired for Management capability that enables an IBM™-compatible computer, typically running Windows™, to boot-up from a server over a network, without the need for an internal hard disk or boot diskette. PXE is generally supported in basic input output system (“BIOS”) firmware. A diskless workstation with PXE enabled BIOS firmware can receive OS boot files from the server over the network. With these OS boot files the diskless workstation can boot-up and commence regular OS runtime operation.
A current drawback of the diskless workstation environment is the inability to perform power management functions that entail deep power cycles, such as suspend-to-disk. Without an internal hard disk, the current diskless workstations are unable to retain the contents of system memory through a deep power cycle. Thus, each time a diskless workstation is powered-off, reset, or power is otherwise removed from the system memory, current diskless workstations must execute a complete boot-up process over the network to return to regular OS runtime operation.